Cuckoo spit turns up on plants every spring. Find out how the tiny insect nymphs that produce it breathe in their homemade aquatic environment in this article by Kephra Beckett, Anne Robertson and Philip Matthews.

A great white shark with a detachable tag attached to its dorsal fin. Photo credit: Andrew Fox.

Great white sharks have warm muscles and could swim really fast but they do not, preferring instead to swim slowly when cruising to catch seals. Yuuki Watanabe and colleagues explain more in their research article.

“…one day I found a vertebral column on my desk with a note that said ‘Dissect me’”

Marianne Porter is an Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University, USA, where she studies biomechanics, functional morphology, and bioinspired robotics. She tells us about her background and education, about teaching and mentoring, parental leave and swimming with sharks.

The Company of Biologists provide grants to fund scientific meetings, workshops and conferences in the fields covered by our journals. Typically, meetings with fewer than 100 people may be granted up to £2,000, increasing up to £6,000 for about 400 people. The next deadline to apply is 25 March 2019.

In preLights, Carola Yovanovich highlights a preprint by Sean Youn, Corey Okinaka and Lydia Mäthger that shows little skates can disguise their eyes by adjusting the degree of constriction of their pupils in response to the graininess of the substrate. It’s now a Research Article in JEB.